Related Series

Support Us

It may not be surprising, but it’s worth noting that the poverty rate for children varies widely by the counties they live in. In Oregon, children in rural counties were the most likely to live in impoverished households.

According to Betsy Hammond, writing in The Oregonian, children in the Lake Oswego, Sherwood, Corbett and West Linn-Wilsonville school districts had six percent or fewer children living under the poverty line.

In contrast, many of the school districts in southeast Oregon’s Harney County and in the Three Rivers school district near Grants Pass had up to one-third of their students living in poverty.

Poverty level is considered $22,050 a year for a family of four.

Students need more assistance in high-poverty communities in order to read and do math. A federal report released last week shows that kids who go to school in low-income districts are about 12 times more likely to be attending low-performing schools, Hammond writes.

Holly Pruett, executive director of Stand for children in Oregon, told the Oregonian:

“For children living in poverty, schools are the essential lifeline to the skills and the inspiration to be able to succeed in life.”

Read Next

A man with a troubled history of violence bounces through the Arkansas mental health and criminal justice systems, finally ending up sick and dangerous on the streets of Washington state, where he commits violent attacks against strangers.

It happened two years ago in Seattle, when James A. Williams stabbed and killed Shannon Harps outside her Capitol Hill apartment. And it may have happened again in Parkland, near Tacoma, on Sunday morning. Police throughout the region currently are looking for Maurice Clemmons, who they want to question in connection with the fatal shootings of four police officers.

In both cases, warning flags were all over the place in the men’s interactions with law enforcement. Prosecutors warned of dangers to the community. Both men threatened family members and members of the court system. Yet in the most recent case, Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, the conservative who now has a weekend show on the Fox network, pardoned Clemmons nine years ago, citing his youth, against warnings by prosecutors.